


everything finds its place and leaves

by kendrasaunders



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, Post S3 Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-31 03:08:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12123210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kendrasaunders/pseuds/kendrasaunders
Summary: caitlin bandages a wounded vibe in her apartment. he does not invite her back onto the team. and in all fairness, she's too busy fixating on him, her, and all of her mistakes to even ask.





	everything finds its place and leaves

**Author's Note:**

> [it's 11:11, when there's not much time left in the day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulr0muQKjk0)

He wakes with a groan, like she knew he would. His body is acclimating to the sudden influx of pain, the new sensation he’d missed while he’d been unconscious. Well. He’d been fading in and out of consciousness first, delirious and feverish. Then unconscious.

“Wait,” Caitlin says, softly. “Don’t- Don’t get up. Stay laying down. You still need to be laying down.”

There used to be authority, when she’d say things like this. There used to be a med bay and good lighting and proper tools. Now it’s him on top of the Ikea bag she’d rushed to cut into a tarp, covering what was already a fairly shitty sofa.

He lays back, curling and uncurling his fingers. She recognizes the gesture, and takes a step back from this makeshift bedside, keeping her own hands at her sides.

“What time is it?” he asks.

“A little past four in the morning,” Caitlin says.

He continues to stare at the ceiling. “Where am I?”

“My apartment,” she says.

“This isn’t your apartment,” he says. “Your apartment is-”

“It’s not- It wasn’t right,” she offers. “This is fine.”

“You live in a basement,” he says.

“I like the basement,” she replies. And she does, in the way that she likes things that make her feel small and trapped and unable to move. This apartment is falling apart, and now reeking of antiseptic. She has no photos. She has boxed all of Ronnie’s things.

“What happened?” he asks. She notices that he sounds… different. Not because of her, but in spite of it, this sudden influx of seriousness that he had to take on. He doesn’t have time to talk to her about unimportant things, to ask about her apartment. To ask about her. She understands.

“You were poisoned,” Caitlin says. “Wally was fighting someone else across town. You were going to die so I- I stopped the poison. I flushed your system. Cleaned the wound.”

This does not earn her a look, or a gesture, or anything, really. “How did you know where I was?”

She sucks on her teeth. “I’m sorry."

“You’ve been following me,” he says, as a matter of fact. There isn’t anything teasing about it, nothing fond. “How long?”

“Since Barry-“ She watches him flinch. “Since then. I’m sorry. About-“

He lets out a small, frustrated noise. “Please don’t pretend to care that Barry’s gone."

She lifts her chin, a small motion, and pretends that this is fine. “I didn’t want it to happen."

"I didn’t say you wanted it,” he says. “I asked you not to pretend to care.”

“Oh,” she says.

“You two-” And he makes that face, the one that is a smile but not a smile at all, the expression he makes when something has upset him.

“What?” she says.

“It’s nothing,” he says. And then, after he sucks in a breath, “Don’t follow me again.”

She takes a seat at the counter island, her kitchen looking into the living room. “I just wanted to help.”

“Do they know where I am?” he asks.

She chews on her tongue. “No.”

“So they’re out looking for me,” he says.

“Probably,” she says.

 

He lets out a small, impatient sigh, and lifts his fingers to his ear, turning on his com link. “Iris?”

Caitlin bows her head for the conversation, feeling as though she is intruding on something private.

“No, I’m- I’m fine. I’ll be- I’ll see you tomorrow. It is tomorrow. I’ll see you later today. Go home. Sleep.”

Caitlin softly taps her fingers, counting to 100. The numbers keep her thoughts steady and unintrusive, and they distract her from the knot in her chest.

“I mean it,” he says. “Sleep.”

Iris must agree on the other line, because Cisco lets out a grumble and drops his arm from his ear.

Caitlin waits for him to say something. To talk about Iris or Wally, Star Labs, anything, but he says nothing, his arm swaying by his side.

“You’ll get mad,” Caitlin says, quietly. “If I ask about her. Right?”

There’s that same expression, and she notices the changes that have occurred to him, between them, in her absence. He does not move so lightly anymore, so freely. When he is upset, she feels it in her bones, in the light shining off his teeth. “Yes,” he says. “I will.”

“Okay,” Caitlin says. She would say she was sorry, but she knows, again, that he wouldn’t believe that, either. She’d meant it. She is sorry about Barry, too. And she’s sorry. “I know why you’d get mad, though,” Caitlin says. “I know- I know I’m the one that did it. I know it was- Foolish. Selfish. Callous.”

“I’m not going to disagree with you, Caitlin,” he says.

“I’m not asking you to,” she says. “I’m not- I’m not fishing for compliments, Cisco. I’m not asking you to see me as something I’m not. You clearly-“ She gestures. “You can see me just fine, I think.”

He blows a piece of hair out of his face.

She looks at her thumbs.

This is the issue, she thinks. That she has always been, in so few words, foolish (loving him), selfish (thinking he’d love her back) and callous (all else), but that he’d been blinded by his own goodness. When he’d look at things, he’d see light, not realizing it had just been his own being reflected back at him.

But it’s hard, she thinks, to stay that way. Look at what had happened to Barry. She can see it happening to Cisco, too, and thinks that’s particularly telling. That the more invested in heroics someone became, the more acutely they could see her for what she was. A monster. An ice queen. A liar.

“Let me just,” she comes back to the carpeted area, kneeling beside the couch again. Closer to him than she has been in months, again breaching the space of his skin. This time, he watches her, the way a mouse watches a snake. This is fair, she thinks. This makes sense. “Look at your stitches. How are you feeling?”

“They hurt,” he says. “But my head’s clear.”

She grabs the antiseptic she kept by the couch, peeling off his bandages and cleaning the wound. His silence is startling- Where he used to make noise over even a papercut, now he takes the burning sensation with little more than a low hiss. “Just make sure to keep this clean and change your bandages,” she says, covering his stitches with fresh gauze.

“I’m free to go?” he asks, and his choice of words wrap themselves around her wrists and tie them to her sides. They remind her not to pry, not to linger. 

“You’re-“ She backs away on her knees, her eyes on the nubby carpet. “You’re all stitched up and good to go.”

 

He rises slowly from her couch, crinkling the cut up bags as he shifts his feet onto the floor. “Caitlin,” he says.

“Mm?” she says, studying his sneakers.

“You can’t be out there,” he says. “You can’t follow me.”

She lifts her head, eyes trained on his face. She rises slowly to her feet, in all her defanged and hollow glory. “Why not?”

She watches him fold his hands over his knees and push himself up. “What do you want me to say?” he asks. “What do you want me to tell you? Do you want me to-“

“I don’t know, Cisco,” she interrupts, before he can figure out where he's going. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t-“ He clasps his hands. “If things were different, if Barry were still here, maybe we could try. Okay? But he’s not, and it’s just-“

“Don’t say it,” she says, turning her head away. “I know you mean- I know you mean me. If I wasn’t- I don’t know why my powers did that either. Okay? But I’ve been- I’ve been practicing, and I- I-“

She catches his gaze from the corner of her eye, dark and full of unspoken grief.

If she asked, he’d let her come back.

But she’d kill him. She lives in the basement, where she is alone, and she stays alone because that is how it needs to be. He’s got enough without her in his life. “I’m sorry. You’re right.”

He presses his lips together, like she’s disappointed him. “I just don’t want you in danger.”

It’s more than that, she thinks. It’s that he doesn’t want her near him at all. Either it hurts too much or it doesn't hurt at all, and both options twist her insides up until they're knotted. Regardless, she should respect his feelings. That’s what friends do. “Okay,” she says. “Whatever you say.”

He reaches for his side, to check her work, but thinks better of it. “Where are my glasses?”

She tilts her head to the counter, where they're waiting for him. “I just didn’t want you to shift in your sleep and damage them. I didn’t tamper with them. I promise.”

He takes them from the counter, brushing his hand against the plastic of her countertops. For a moment there is only that, him studying her living space and her trying to disappear. “I didn’t think you would,” he says, finally, his hands returning to where they belong. He slips his glasses on, pushing back his hair. The motion of it fills her with the horrible pain of longing. “Thank you, Caitlin,” he says. “I- Thank you.”

“Of course,” she says.

For a moment, she catches something polite at the corners of his mouth, a smile that is not at all a smile, just a quiet goodbye.

She returns it with her own watery gaze, and waits until his portal has opened and closed. She waits until he is gone. And finally, she sits down on her floor.  
  


She rests like that for a moment, deciding it better to sprawl onto her back, her hair fanning out under her head.

She brushes her fingers against her side, a phantom pain where she’d given Cisco his stitches. “I’m sorry,” she says again, like she hasn’t said it so many times tonight already. “I mean it,” she continues. It’s not about the sound of her voice. It’s not about her tone. It’s that no one in their right mind would still believe her.

She believes herself- But she understands. 

She opens her mouth to speak again, and closes it just as quickly. The quiet of her apartment suits her. So does the solitude. 

She remembers what it was like not to be given up on. That was a long time ago.

Her skin is smooth under her fingers.

“I mean it,” she repeats, and no one responds.


End file.
